DPM is a VMware feature that manages power consumption by ESX hosts. DRS is a VMware facility that manages the assignment of virtual machines to ESX hosts.

Site Recovery Manager

temporarily deactivates DPM for the clusters on the recovery site and ensures that all hosts in the cluster are powered on when recovery or test recovery starts. This allows for sufficient host capacity while recovering virtual machines. After the recovery or test is finished,

Site Recovery Manager

restores the DPM settings on the cluster on the recovery site to their original values.

For planned migration and reprotect operations,

Site Recovery Manager

also deactivates DPM on the affected clusters on the protected site and ensures that all of the hosts in the cluster are powered on. This allows

Site Recovery Manager

to complete host level operations, for example unmounting datastores or cleaning up storage after a reprotect operation. After the planned migration or reprotect operation has finished,

Site Recovery Manager

restores the DPM settings on the cluster on the protected site to their original values.

The hosts in the cluster are left in the running state so that DPM can power them down as needed.

Site Recovery Manager

registers virtual machines across the available ESX hosts in a round-robin order, to distribute the potential load as evenly as possible.

Site Recovery Manager

always uses DRS placement to balance the load intelligently across hosts before it powers on recovered virtual machines on the recovery site.

If DRS is enabled and in fully automatic mode, DRS might move other virtual machines to further balance the load across the cluster while

Site Recovery Manager

is powering on the recovered virtual machines. DRS continues to balance all virtual machines across the cluster after

Site Recovery Manager

has powered on the recovered virtual machines.